February 22, 2013--Chapter 27: Take Me I'm Yours (Part One)

You will not be surprised to learn that Lydia took a lover.  In truth, many.  As did I.   Though only a few.  I can tell you about two of hers—the ones I met.  And of course about mine.  There were in fact three.  Though, for the sake of equality, I will limit myself to reporting about just two.  No need to take advantage of the numerical situation.  Things were bad enough. 

And I can tell you how it ended.  But before I begin--fair warning: this is not going to be pretty.

Speaking of the unpleasant, you may be wanting to hear more about our wedding.  I left you with Lydia raging in my room about not having being selected to dance with Martha Graham in her last masterpiece, Clytemnestra.  This, after the hundreds of hours she slavishly spent studying Graham’s body-distorting technique, a technique that called upon acolytes to compress their bodies into a perpetual mash of inner organs; and after so much devotion and study, including in her Greek literature class at Barnard, such ideal preparation, Lydia ranted about how she would be perfect to perform choreography based upon Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy of lust and betrayal. 

As an aside, that latter emotion, betrayal, I had felt filtering into our own relationship and the former, the lust, was something I had agreed to work on, you recall, in the literal hands of her own bioenergetic therapist, Dr. Luven, in order to enhance my ability to express and deliver to Lydia that lust, more ecstatically in the future than as in the more tragic, perhaps even satiric present. 

So, I left you with how in the midst of paroxysms of bed-beating rage, Lydia had agreed to proceed with the wedding and gave the go-ahead to send out, to quote her again, “the fucking invitations.”

Thus, following my graduation from Columbia in early June, later that same month, representatives from both families, and the few friends we had in common, schlepped out to sultry New Jersey to the B’nai-B’nai Temple in South Orange where the ultra-reformed Rabbi David Phillips, without even the cover of a yarmulke, performed the ceremony, totally in English, complete with a brief, quite secular sermon directed pointedly at Lydia and me, in which he told us, actually me, to worry less about being fruitful and multiplying and more to devoting ourselves, myself, to all forms of “love’s expressions.” 

He gave special emphasis to the all; and just in case anyone missed his inflection, he added a wink so theatrical that it was visible all the way to the back benches where my nearly-deaf Aunt Madeline, who had at the last moment decided, after all, to attend, in her widely-imitated voice, just like a seagull’s, cawed, “What?  What did he say?  What is he saying?  I think he’s talking about sex.”  And when all heads were craned in her direction, added, “Doesn’t he know this is a wedding not an orgy?” 

In the face of that barked chastisement, as if his admonition needed further amplification, with Lydia squirming at my side, Rabbi Phillips made quite a display of draining the cup of the remaining sacramental wine.  It was French, actually, the deep ruby Medoc he had required us to provide as part of the deal to perform the ceremony.  Considering her carnal interests, though she had shown little interest in any other aspects of the wedding plans, Lydia had clearly made an inspired choice of clergymen to, so to speak, unite us. 

By the end of the ceremony, which was also suffused with pulpy erotica selected from Kahlil Gibran’s Prophet, about “filling each other’s cup” and “love caressing our tenderest quivering branches,” I too was set asquirm by the challenges Rabbi Phillips and Gibran and Lydia had set for me to take on.  This even before the ink was dry on the marriage certificate.

And of course Madeline punctuated it all by having the last word, “What are those ‘quivering cups’ he keeps talking about?  What is he talking about?  To tell you the truth, I don’t think he’s a real rabbi.  Where’s his yarmalkie?”  For the first time in Zazlo family history everyone appeared to agree with her.  Or was I just projecting?

*    *    *

Following the ceremony, between the six dinner courses, after completing the obligatory dances, after the customary toasts to our health, happiness, and progeny—never mind what the rabbi had said--Lydia and I finally wove our way to the table where the Zazlo aunts and uncles were clustered.  Actually squashed together since the Lydia’s parents, the Lichters, needed my parents to find a place to seat Madeline and her husband Harry who had accepted their invitation just three days earlier.  “If she insists on coming,” Mr. Lichter had said to my father, “you’ll have to find room for her at one of your tables.  I’m not paying the caterer one more dime to add an extra one.  I’m already being robbed blind because your side insisted on shrimp cocktail.”

Since this was true and the Lichters had been so accommodating to that request, for once my father managed to restrain himself, and as soon as his about-to-be fellow father-in-law hung up he began, on a yellow pad full of circles that he drew with great precision, to come up with all the possible combinations of Zazlos that a ten-person table could yield for the now twelve siblings and their spouses.  This took him until 3:00 AM in the morning, not because any of his brothers or sisters would have been insulted if Madeline were not seated with them, but rather the opposite.  If Madeline, for example, was assigned a seat next to her brothers Sunny or Ben or her sister Roslyn that would assure that they would have such a miserable time that they would likely leave well before the bride cut the cake.   Madeline was that kind of sister.  And aunt.

And if that were to happen, my father speculated, who knew if they would leave their gift checks as they raced back to Brooklyn.  “After what I had to go through to get them their shrimp,” he muttered, “they had better pay up.”

So he had prevailed upon my mother to allow Madeline to sit between them; and when Lydia and I finally made it to their table, there she was proudly sandwiched between my parents in her trademark sweat suit.  It appeared to be embellished for the occasion with a smattering of sequins that she had stitched to her top in a way that emphasized the shape of her breasts.   Also for the occasion, she had had her hair buzz-cut at the barber school on Kings Highway.  Thus she was glamorized for the wedding and at the same all set for a long hot summer on the Brighton Beach boardwalk.   She was well known for being economical.  Some said “cheap.”

“Hello, my favorite nephew, you,” she trilled, ignoring Lydia.   They had not met before this moment.  Lydia had refused to make the traditional pre-wedding round of the Zazlo relatives.  Anticipating what might be coming, my mother began to slide down in her chair so that only her face and bouffant showed above the tabletop.

“Hi, Aunt Madeline, I’m glad you were able to come to the wedding so you could meet Lydia.  We were all along hoping that  . . .”  I managed to say that much before she returned to the subject of Rabbi Phillips.

“Where did you find that so-called rabbi?  With a name like, wha, ‘Phyllis’?”

“Actually, ‘Phillips.’  Lydia wanted someone who  . . .”

“And where did you find her?”  She pointed toward Lydia without even glancing in her direction.  “To me she also looks like a goy.”  I cringed but out of the corner of my eye it appeared that Lydia was smiling.  Thus, I resumed my breathing.

“No Aunt Madeline, she comes from a fine Jewish family.  The Lichters.”  I pronounced their name with as much phlegm in my voice as possible to emphasize their Semitic roots.

“I never heard of them.  I’m sure they’re not from Brooklyn so what kind of Jews can they be?” 

She continued not to acknowledge Lydia who, considering her usual combativeness, surprisingly said, “Not very good ones I admit.  My parents wanted to change their names to ‘Lewis,’ isn’t that ridiculous; and I had a nose job when I was sixteen.”  She turned her head and tipped it upward into the light so that Madeline could get a clear view of the surgeon’s work.

Taking that as an invitation, Madeline hoisted herself with oey’s and vey’s from her chair and shuffled in her new Keds sneakers toward Lydia, adjusting her reading glasses on the broken slope of her own nose.  When she got to within a foot of Lydia, she reached out and ran her dry fingers up and down over it, pronouncing it a success to all the gaping Zazlos, “Now that’s what I call a nose job.”  Everyone at the adjacent tables, including the Lichter aunts and uncles, twisted in the chairs to get a closer look at what was happening.  When all eyes were upon Madeline she turned to her hated sister-in-law Lola and pronounced, with the same conviction, “Not like the one that butcher did to your Lori.”

With that she broke out into raucous gull-throated laughter, hurled herself into Lydia’s arms, and, entwined that way, began to dance in place as the band again struck up its version of Hava Nagila.  Martha Graham this wasn’t.

While thus cojoined, we all heard Madeline offer her own guidance to Lydia, “Keep an eye on him.  He’s a Zazlo.  I know them all.  The men are the worst.  They can’t keep their peckers in their pants,” she gestured contemptuously toward her brother Sunny, “Not that anyone should be interested in it.  It’s nothing special.  Trust me.  I know what I’m talking about.  I work in his office.  And your father-in-law, one day I’ll tell you a thing or three about him.  When was the last time you think they did it?  And my brother Ben.  A useless capon if you know what I mean.”  At this revelation, she offered a wink that rivaled Rabbi Phillips’; and my very proper mother, to get away from this ribaldry, finished sliding under the table.  “So I am not sure what you can expect of him,” she continued, now meaning me.  I was glad my mother was no longer there to hear this part.

“So If you ask me, and I know you didn’t, if you want to do some of that quivering that Rabbi what’s-his-name went on and on about, you had better find yourself a man.  Because from the looks of him,” meaning me again, “I think you found yourself a boy.  Lots of training he’ll need.”

Still embracing, she and Lydia collapsed in a roar of laughter.  “That’s what I needed to do.  I got myself a man!”  She pointed derisively toward her third husband Harry, who had by then collapsed, but not from laughter.  He had, all by himself, almost finished emptying a full bottle of Haig & Haig Pinch.

Madeline’s had proven to be our true benediction.  It guided so much of Lydia’s behavior toward me.  That behavior was, in fact, already moving along a certain trajectory even before Madeline’s imperatives, especially Lydia’s efforts to turn this boy into some sort of man.  But Lydia took Madeline’s guidance as if it were a sanction bequeathed to her by many generations of failed Zazlo men; and thus while waiting for that halting metamorphosis of boy-to-man to occur, impatient with my lack of progress, Lydia, following in her new aunt’s footsteps, also began the process of getting herself a man.  Actually, men.

*    *    *

And so even a casual reader will not be surprised to learn what I stumbled onto when, just short of four-and-a-half years to the day after we were married by Rabbi Phillips, when I made a special effort to return early from my first coast-to-coast trip, from UCLA where I had been invited to present a paper on the “Prophetic Works of William Blake,” the subject of my master’s thesis.  I was so excited to see my bride and share my success (the conference chair had wittily said, to a smattering of applause, that for a paper about a prophetic work it was “revelatory”) that I had happily paid the fee to change my airline ticket to an earlier flight.  But when I burst through the door at 11:00 p.m., wanting so much to take Lydia in my arms and sweep her up to our nuptial bed where celebrations of our half-anniversary and my triumph would commence, there on our Spanish-style sofa, which in its opulence represented a splurge from Bloomingdales, as if it were more his house than mine, was draped, like a male odalisque, wearing just low-cut black briefs, a bruiser of no more than nineteen, who I immediately realized was certainly not a delivery boy.

“Oh, Ludavicio,” I heard Lydia sing from the floor above, most likely from our bedroom.  “Was that you at the door?  I thought I heard something.  Or was it just the wind?  It is gusting so.”  Ludavicio did not stir, thinking, I suspected, that if he remained motionless I might not notice him, perhaps mistaking him for a new chatchka.

Not fooled but bewildered and deflated, I also did not move.  I stood rigidly in place in the entrance hall of the neo-Victorian house we had recently purchased, with my parents supplying the down payment and Lydia’s grandparents the private mortgage, in the heart of Brooklyn’s Flatbush.  All I knew was that there was a nearly naked post-adolescent spread out on my brocaded sofa, that from his name he was most likely Italian, and that Lydia was clearly entertaining him on a night that I was still supposed to be in Los Angeles. 

“I’ll be right down,” she trilled in her most alluring coloratura.  And in the same instant she swooped down the stairs; and as she neared the bottom, in a single graceful move more Merce than Martha, she launched herself in a balletic leap that carried her clear across the hallway where I still stood transfixed.  It was a leap so adroit, with so much lift and arc, that it carried her directly onto the living room’s shag rug, another extravagance, where with arms akimbo she landed as if to present herself to him.  As if to announce, “Take me; I am yours.”

But as she sailed by me in the superheated air, she must have, out in the margins of her excellent peripheral vision, noticed that there was someone else there to interrupt whatever was planned; because even as she offered herself to him, she turned to look toward whomever it was who had disruptively thrust himself into their midst.  And then, with considerable aplomb, without missing a beat, while who that intruder was developed like a photograph in her consciousness (it was her husband), Lydia said, “Lloyd, darling,” she had never addressed me as such, “I’m so glad you’re here.  This is Ludavicio,” her Italian of course was perfect, “I told you all about him, didn’t I?” 

And since I neither moved nor responded, I was so stunned by the situation, her audacity, and especially by what she was wearing—a white, totally translucent leotard that did not even begin to obscure the fact that it was her only garment—she undauntedly chirped on, “But you of course do know that he is my partner in the piece I am choreographing to present to Merce.  Merce Cunningham.”   What I did remember was that she had moved on from frustration with Martha to hope with Merce.   But about Ludavicio, in spite of her matter-of-factness, I knew nothing.  Though from his still calm and languid pose, a mere spectator now in our tawdry family drama, from that sangfroid, I know for certain he was Italian--he had obviously witnessed, been in the middle of this kind of complexity before.  From the glorious looks of him, most likely many times before.   For me, though, it was still unfamiliar territory; terra incognita about which I would soon become an expert explorer.

“I was just about to make us some tea,” Lydia said still totally insouciant.  “And darling,” darling again, “would you also like a cup?  After such a long flight, wouldn’t some green tea be perfect?  It will calm you.”  Calming in fact I could use.  “I also have some Madeleines that I bought from Colette’s in the City.”  Again pronounced perfectly and in just two syllables--she was an accomplished linguist.  “You love them, I know.  You always say they are so ‘literary.’ So Proust.”  She was at her seductive and radiant best. 

All of her attention appeared now to be focused on me, and for a moment I almost forgot who else was splayed out just across from us.  Thus I felt myself beginning to want to tell her about how well my paper was received, my triumph.  I could not stop myself from saying, “You know how I had been wondering if anyone knew Blake’s Four Zoas.  No one reads it these days.  It’s so dark and coded.  It was such a risk to spend so much time on it, but . . .” 

Ludavicio began to stir, clearly not interested in Blake much less so obscure a work.  It was also clear that Lydia, who had danced into the kitchen and was filling the tea pot with water, was not wanting to interrupt her plans for the evening by listening to my rattling on about Blake’s epic about Albion, his prelapsarian “primal man,” especially since she had one waiting there for her in the other room.

“Darling, come get three tea cups and those lovely Delft dishes my father brought back from Amsterdam.  Put them on a tray.  That one over there.  And take them up to the studio on the third floor.  I’ll bring the teapot in a moment.  Ludavicio can help with the Madeleines.  I so much want to show you what we have been working on.”  She added with what felt like emphasis, “That’s of course why he is here.”

Either from jet lag or the utter amazement and disorientation I felt from the hallucination into which I had fallen right there in my own house in the geographic center of bourgeoisie Brooklyn; either from Lydia’s breezy matter-of-factness or Ludavicio’s insouciance, as if in a spell, I robotically retrieved the cups and saucers and plates, stacked them on Lydia’s favorite gilded tray, the one with the reproduction of Manet’s Olympia printed on it, and began to mount the two flights of oak stairs that led to the dance studio in the attic. 

Once there, slightly out of breath, on a small cot that Lydia had dragged up the steps, presumably in lieu of a sofa and which, since there was no other furniture there except a battered folding chair, also served as the only place to set the tray and arrange the cups on their dainty saucers.  Since we would all have to find room to squat together on the bed, with care I arranged the bone china in a way that I felt would best accommodate the awkward threesome we represented—two on one side close together, for Lydia and me of course, and on the other side, as far away as the tiny bed would allow, a place setting for, was it, “Lorenzo”?

*    *    *

It seemed to take at least fifteen minutes for them to arrive and to burst, crunched side-by-side, through the narrow doorway into the studio.  This seemed longer than I would have thought necessary since the water had already begun to steam when I had left the kitchen, and how difficult was it to arrange the six admittedly luscious Madeleines on the oval serving dish?

“Let the tea steep for a few more minutes,” Lydia chirped, “I want so much for you to see what we have been preparing for Merce.”  Thankfully, Lorenzo had pulled on a pair of jeans, but still he was not wearing a shirt or shoes.  This, at least to me, made him look more convincingly like a dancer.  “The piece,” Lydia bubbled, “is set to Lou Harrison’s Suite for Symphonic Strings.  I played it for you last year.  Remember how you said you liked its Eastern influences?”  She seemed genuinely interested in my reactions.  “Merce is interested in that too, East and West, and of course so is John Cage.”  She paused and looked at Lorenzo who remained framed in the doorway, “I think they’re a couple.  Don’t you Ludavicio?”  Ah, it was “Ludavicio.”  “They are lovers, no?”  He smiled back at her inscrutably, more East than West, not saying a word or even nodding. 

“But who cares,” Lydia sang as she placed the LP on the turntable, “Life is too short, don’t you think, to wonder about who is sleeping with whom?”  I’m not sure to whom that rhetorical question was directed.  She added with a sign, philosophically, “Isn’t that all just a silly game?”

And with that the first sensuous churning cello chords of the Suite filled the space; and Lydia, in an instant, had Ludavicio take her in his arms.  It is true he did move gracefully but, I detected, without the telltale energy of a well-trained modern dancer.  It would not have been unreasonable for one to have suspected that he had just learned his role, perhaps even just ten or fifteen minutes before, because as an apparent novice he was being used by Lydia, in effect, as a prop as she wrapped her torso around his waist and then sinuously unwound herself, snake like, winding up in a coil at his feet as the first section of the music thundered precisely to a conclusion.

While curled there, Lydia announced, “I think that’s enough, don’t you?”  That was clearly directed to me. “The tea will be getting cold and you do have to tell us all about Los Angeles.”  Holding on to Ludavicio’s hips she raised herself slower than required from the studio floor.  The Harrison piece continued, now more subdued in the background.  It was clear that they hadn’t rehearsed anything beyond this.  The performance was thus over.

Lydia bounced onto the cot with such force that all of the dishes I had so carefully arranged jumped in the air and wound up scrambled together in the middle of the mattress.  And she had plopped herself down where I thought Ludavicio would settle, which meant that he and I would need to find our own places.  Uncharacteristically, for up until then he had been so slow to move, he this time took the initiative to squat next to Lydia, which thus left me with the only remaining place at the other end, facing them.  And from that vantage point, I had to acknowledge that they did look handsome together as they found themselves pitched toward each other because their aggregated weight had compressed the mattress into a concavity.  Arranged this way, on the bed together, to me they appeared much more natural then they had in their recent, very brief pas de deux.

The tea was by then lukewarm, but still its gentle jolt of caffeine must have had the effect of emboldening me.  So I ignored Lydia’s questions about my Four Zoas paper and looked directly at Ludavicio.  “Tell me Ludavicio, did you study, as Lydia did, with Martha?”  My question caught him off guard and for the first time he lost some of his natural self-possession. 

I saw him give Lydia a flickering, was it a nervous glance.  Her smile appeared locked in place but she still managed to answer for him.  I wondered if he spoke English.  Thus far he had not uttered one word in any language.  She quickly said, still sounding nonplussed, “He actually is self-taught.  Which is remarkable, don’t you think?”

I ignored her and managed to keep my eyes fixed on him.  He stared back at me, betraying nothing.  “So what else do you do?  Are you in school?  You look young enough to be.”

“He isn’t,” Lydia jumped in to respond, “He’s actually just living in the city, trying to find a place for himself in the theater or dance world.  I think he’s very talented, don’t you?”  I didn’t answer.  Undeterred she asked, “Would you like some more tea?  It’s very good, I think.”  She leaned across Ludavicio to retrieve the pot.

I continued to press him.  But he had already regained whatever mote of composure he had lost by my confronting him so directly.  “So you’re taking acting classes?  With Lee Strasberg or Stella Adler, I assume?”  I was getting tired and my aggression was increasing.

“No, darling, he’s just beginning.  He’s not quite ready for them yet.   He needs to be brought along gently.  He’s so sensitive and tender.”

“So how are you supporting yourself?” I shot in his direction, not believing how audacious I had become.

“I’m sure it will not surprise you that he comes from a very successful Milanese family and they are helping him.”  For the first time I felt a little defensiveness from Lydia.

“So he’s doing nothing and living off his parents.”  This was not a question but a statement and, like a salvo, I launched it this time directly toward Lydia.  “Don’t you think?”  I added with a smirk.  Two could play at that “don’t-you-think” game.

“Well he does earn some money.”  Lydia, I was pleased to notice, was at last becoming snippy.  I knew from that I must have been getting to her.

So I pressed on, “Doing what?  Servicing housewives while their husbands are out of town?”  This was admittedly well below the belt because, though Lydia did not have a job and I paid all expenses, including hers, she felt, actually, she asserted with considerable passion and forcefully articulated righteousness that I was subsidizing, patronizing her art.  In the great tradition of art patrons.  Nothing made her more furious than being called, as this time in a consciously sexist way, a “housewife.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Professor,” she sputtered, having at last lost control, mocking my modest earning capacity, “he does make money on his own.  If you must know, he does very well modeling for artists.  He has a magnificent, perfectly articulated body.”  And she added as an aside, “Not that you would notice.”  I had in fact noticed when I first saw him posing on our sofa.  And out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of Ludavicio now proudly flexing his pectoral muscles, alternating the left and right ones.

“And besides that, he’s gay!” Lydia spat at me, “So you can relax.”  And with that, with dancer’s grace, she bounded up from the cot and stormed out of the room, slamming the door as she exited and stomped down the steps, leaving Ludavicio and me alone together on the mattress.  The Harrison piece had ended some time ago and all that could be heard was the steam clanking in the original cast iron radiators.

In truth, feeling uncomfortable from being left in such a situation with a half-naked Ludavicio, who continued involuntarily to pose and preen, I turned back toward him with considerable tentativeness.

He looked back at me slyly and said the only two words I ever heard him utter, neither with any apparent accent. 

Shaking his head from side to side, smiling coyly he said, “I’m not.”

*    *    *

And so, from that awkward evening with Ludavicio, as the implications became clear to me—that I was a cuckold--you will I feel certain understand and sympathize that I quickly moved to gain retribution of an admittedly self-indulgent and even pleasurable sort—as Lydia had taken Aunt Madeline’s advice to “get” herself a man, or a man-child as she had in Lorenzo’s or Ludavicio’s case, I too began my search for a women who would find my capacities, whatever Lydia thought of their inadequacies, quite sufficient, thank you very much..

And I am pleased to report that it did not take very long—incredibly, just one day.  And I did not have to search very far—just in the office cubicle next door to mine at Brooklyn College, where a young research associate, freshly minted at Sarah Lawrence College, greeted me with, “I know it’s your birthday on Thursday, Mr. Zazlo; and I was wondering how you might be planning to celebrate.” 

I was so flattered and frankly stunned that she knew this about me, I was hardly well enough known for my birthday to be noted by anyone beyond my family and a few friends, that I did not even think to inquire why on earth she was aware of such a thing, much less of me.  But, in my current state of being, about to launch myself, so to speak, I was confessedly doubly flattered by her question, especially its somewhat wicked tone which suggested that perhaps she had ideas of her own about how that celebration might best occur.  And, then, as I am in a confessional mood, I could not help but notice that she would have made an ideal candidate to be featured in her former college’s catalogue as personifying the stereotypically brainy, artsy, sultry, “Sarah Lawrence Girl”—they were not in that era yet referred to as “women.” 

In other words, Kim Drake (that was what was printed on the cardboard name-tent on her desk) was exactly the kind of woman my Aunt Madeline, if she were advising me rather than Lydia, would have suggested I “get.” 

And so I said, in as snappy a manner as my rusty self was capable of mustering, “That’s my father’s name, ‘Mr. Zazlo.’   Please, Kim is it, I’m Lloyd.”  I felt that I was performing so well that I added, “Can you believe it, my father wanted to name me ‘Lord,’” she was smiling up at me as if that was the most amusing thing she had ever heard, her perfect teeth in glorious chiaroscuro to her brown skin—she was, in addition to all of her other obvious endowments, which were apparent even though she was seated hunched over her typewriter, a Negress.   Gloriously and to me exotically so.  “I’m being serious.  He thought it would help me get restaurant reservations—you know, if I were ‘Lord Zazlo.’”

“He thought back then, when you were just a new born, about restaurants?  He must be an unusual man.”  She had a slight lisp which made her perfection, by contrast, even more astonishing.

“About that yes, but in other ways he is less imaginative.”

“So where did your imagination come from?  I read one of your stories, ‘Under Mother’s Bed,’ in Black Sun.”  She arched her back to release the tension from her shoulder muscles.  It was difficult not to lower my eyes to take in her body, but I did, in an act of great restraint, manage to keep them fixed on hers.  “It was a very poignant story.  And very chilling, almost Kafkaesque, especially that part where the young boy hides under her bed while the police question his mother about a crime that was committed in the neighborhood, one that you never describe.”

That had in fact been my story, the only one I had up to that time been able to publish, albeit in a magazine that was mimeographed rather than printed and had a stapled binding.  “It’s remarkable that you saw it.  I had thought no one ever noticed it.  It’s published out of someone’s apartment on the Lower Eastside.” 

“I did find it tucked away on the lowest shelf of the Little Magazine corner in the Eighth Street Bookstore.  It’s my favorite place to rummage.  Perhaps I was attracted to the name of the magazine—Black Sun.”  She paused to allow me to wonder why that title among so many might have attracted her beyond what was obvious.  She got up out of the chair and, though she was wearing flats, she uncoiled to reach to almost my height—she was perhaps a bit more than six feet.  Still smiling, now standing close enough so I could almost taste her musky scent, she said, almost in a whisper, “It is fate, isn’t it, that I found your story in that issue just as I found you right here in an adjoining office.”  She added, leaning even closer, this time in an actual whisper, “I want to learn more about that little boy and have you tell me about the crime that I suspect he committed.”

I could feel myself melting.  Would she, would Kim Drake turn out to be my Ludavicio? 

In fact, she did.  And it all unfolded quickly and effortlessly because, in addition to being exactly the kind of twenty-something woman who would ignite my prematurely moribund glands, she intuitively knew that this kind of visceral attraction was a necessary yet insufficient precondition to draw me into a liaison—I was too self-righteously inhibited for that in itself to work—she knew that I needed to “fall in love,” or at least convince myself that I was, before becoming a philanderer.  I was that kind of husband.  In spite of Ludavicio.

“So we should talk then, shouldn’t we, about how to make Thursday special.  So memorable that you will feel compelled to tell me about that bad boy’s secrets.”

I was, thankfully, beginning to feel inklings of love—it’s first tremor.  “Ah,” I was not good or practiced at this, “Ah, I do have plans for the evening.  At least I assume there are plans.  My, ah, Lydia,” I could not utter the word wife, “Lydia, she I’m sure will make something special for dinner.  Maybe, ah,” I had averted my eyes, embarrassed by my pathetic stammerings, “perhaps she even made a reservation for dinner somewhere.”

“You mean,” Kim sparkled, “for Lord and Lady Zazlo?”  I felt the heat of her smile even as I was still unable to lift my head to look directly at her.

I was from that filled with, yes, love for her.  The inklings had by that playful gesture been sufficiently metamorphosed into the requisite amount of love that I required to proceed.  Here I had been launched, in the spirit of my fabled aunt and the need to even the score with Lydia, here I was determined to begin to roam about in order to get a woman; but in the short space of less than ten minutes I had been completely and totally captured.  Gotten.

“That means, unless you have a class on Thursday, that your day might be free.  Yes?”  She stood there glowing at me in expectation.

One of my freshmen Comp and Lit sections did meet Thursdays from 10-11:30; but I quickly said, “No, in fact,” I lied, “I spend Thursdays in the library up at Columbia.  I have two more chapters to complete for my thesis.  It’s on Blake’s Prophetic works.  You know, the prophetic works.  I need to do more research about the Book of Ezekiel.”  I had no ideal why I was rattling on that way.  Things had been going so well when we were talking about Lord and my Black Sun story.

“But that is just perfect.”  I must have looked puzzled, how could my needing to be in Butler Library all day be “perfect” when Kim seemed to want to help me celebrate my birthday?  “I have to pick up my father’s car.  I need it to help move the last of my things to my new apartment on the Lower Eastside.  I think it might even be right next to where that magazine of yours is published,” did she wink at me?  “The car’s in Westchester so I can pick you up at Columbia and maybe from there we can go to a wonderful clam shack I know on City Island where we can have lobster rolls and a glass of champagne.  I’ll bring that too.  That is unless you can’t leave Blake for the day.”  She paused to let that have its effect, and then said, “If you couldn’t that would make me so jealous.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be.  Of course I can jilt him.  Actually, I very much want to.  I need a break from Blake.  From those four nagging Zoas who pull the chariot of God’s spirit.”  Again, I found myself pathetically reverting to the pedantic when I should have been guided by my aunt’s spirit and answered Kim with some genuine poetry.  I promised myself I would work on some before Thursday.

But she was happily not turned off by my awkwardness and said, “So we agree, on Thursday it will be me instead of your Blake.”  I was impressed that even at a college noted for its progressivism, she would have learned about his late works, “And I will scoop you up at precisely 11:00 on Amsterdam and 116^th Street and whisk you off to a barefoot birthday walk along the beach before toasting you with nectar.  How does that sound?”  She hardly needed to ask since she had reached out to touch my arm just where the leather patch had been affixed to the elbow of my tweed jacket and could feel my trembling.

“Better than anything I might have imagined,” I managed to say with a hint of a smile, “And I promise, no thesis talk.”

At that she smiled back more radiantly and said, blowing what I thought to be a kiss as she darted out, “Until them, my little lamb.”

*    *    *

Lydia had not in fact made any special plans for Thursday evening nor had she noticed that I left for my morning class, which I had been careful to cancel, in unusually casual clothes, wearing shoes but no socks.  She was so preoccupied by rehearsals with Merce Cunningham’s junior company, he had “adored” the choreography she had previewed for me with Ludavicio, that I suspect if I had left for work that day in my pajamas, she would have given them scant notice.

“I’m not sure when I’ll be home tonight,” she hollered down to me as I gulped some tepid coffee in the kitchen before racing toward the city.  “I know it’s your birthday, but you know Merce.  I’ll leave some lasagna for you.  I know how much you love that.  Just heat it up in the microwave.  We’ll find some time, I’m sure, over the weekend.  Maybe we’ll go to Chinatown.  OK?”  I didn’t even bother to respond.  She would not have heard me in any case and I was eager to get to the subway and then on to meet my golden Luvah.

I got out of the subway at 10:30 and with a half hour to kill drifted along Broadway where I had prowled as an undergraduate.  I poked my head into the West End Bar where Johnny the bartender was still ensconced.  He nodded at me as nonchalantly as if I had been there just the night before; and then I darted across the two lanes of traffic and onto the grounds of Columbia, taking note of the new Ferris Booth Student Center, an ugly modern glass and brick pile that had recently been completed and now stood there dumbly defiling the stoic faux-classicism of the other buildings silently squeezed onto that huge rectangle of a campus.

I made my way east on College Walk by the Alma Mater statue riveted to her throne, immobily facing south toward Butler Library where I claimed I carried out my arcane research whereas, in truth, I had abandoned my thesis two years ago and was in dread of what that would soon mean to my faltering academic career.  Thus every aspect of the day was built on lies and self-deception.  Both perfect preparation, in that era of thwarted desire, to betrayal. 

Just as that dark Dostoyevskyian thought crossed my mind, right as the bells in Saint Paul’s Chapel tolled eleven times, precisely as I reached Amsterdam Avenue, Kim pulled up, startling me out of my mordant reverie in a squeal of braking tires.  She sang out in my direction, “Oh Lord, it’s me, Luvah.” 

I could hear her clearly even as traffic roared by because she was, could it have been more perfect for transgression, seated with the top down in her father’s red Fiat convertible.  Of course she was wearing a silk scarf.  Intoxicating echoes of Isadora Duncan. 

Danger was lurking in the air; and without hesitation, eagerly, I breathed it deeply in as I vaulted into the seat beside her.  Without, of course, opening the door.  I did it quite well, I am pleased to be able to report, even with some flair, managing thankfully not to catch my foot and thereby shatter the illusion.  In that spirit, Claude Lalouch’s Un Homme et une Femme came to mind.  At least images of their sexy Fiat, as Kim roared away from the curb, north toward what I imagined would be a sun-bleached, half-abandoned clam shack leaning into the wind whipping off Long Island Sound.  With Kim, for support, leaning against me.  My sepia Anouk Aimee. 

Always when on that campus, as if it took possession of me, I found myself unable to resist spouting these kind of art-house references and thus was doubly thrilled to be speeding away from it and the pretensions it had osmotically engendered in me.  I was hoping that at last I might no longer need them since that pretender was no longer me.

*    *    *

City Island was not quite what I had been imagining.  What through the week of waiting I anticipated, a close-in Cape Cod, turned out to be more like familiar south-Brooklyn Canarsie.  There were more rows of two-family attached houses with asbestos siding embossed to look like fieldstone than shingled cottages cantilevered into dunes.  And what beach there was, squeezed between the dingy boatyards, had more broken glass than white sand so there was no possibility, another deflated fantasy, of tossing my loafers into the back seat and running off toward the light, holding hands with Kim.  It would be necessary to reign in what had been my soaring expectations since I had to be careful not to cut my feet since I had not gotten a Tetanus shot since elementary school.

Perhaps sensing my deflation, Kim, still attempting to be upbeat, said, “This is not at all how I remember the Island from my childhood.  When I came here with my parents, to escape the heat of the Hudson Valley, none of these houses existed.  It was all very unspoiled and I thought romantic.  That I would come back one day, when I was grown, to experience that romance.”

With that she clutched my arm and pressed her breasts into my chest.  “Let’s go right over to the Clam Bar.  I’m sure it hasn’t changed and we can sit out on the deck and eat.  I have the champagne right here in the cooler.”  She pulled on my arm, shaking me to revive my spirits and to direct me toward an unpaved cul-de-sac that led toward the water.  But it was in truth more her body’s closeness and its heat than thoughts of food that roused me.  That occurred quite instantly, and I was already thinking about what she had arranged for us to do after the lobster rolls.

Anticipating that and excited again, this time with me tugging on her, we literally skipped down the lane, as she might have done a dozen years ago, but now with a man on her arm.

Thus we bounded along like giddy children until the restaurant loomed before us and, at that, Kim let go of me and stood there, fixed in place while staring wistfully at it.  And for the first time, with sadness in her voice, sighed, “Oh Lloyd, it’s not at all how I remember it.  So much time has passed.  Look what they’ve done to it.”  She sagged beside me and let her head come to rest on my shoulder.  “It used to be so magical,” she said as if to herself, “Now it has that garish sign and all the weathered benches have been replaced with plastic.  I hate them.”  I could feel her beginning to weep for lost time, she all of twenty-two, and the inexorable debasement that that had brought.

“It is your special day and I so wanted everything to be perfect.”  She by then was sobbing and punched her fist in frustration into her hip.  But in spite of her unhappiness, as I attempted to comfort her as best I could, I also felt myself further aroused by her desperation.  I did not pause to think what that might say about me.  The sensation was too exciting.

“There, there, Kim,” I said, stroking her coarse hair, “I’m fine.  The best present of all is being here with you in a place that has so many memories.”  I was feeling enough of a sense of arousal and love for her at that vulnerable moment to allow myself to continue to imagine the real celebration that I hoped was waiting.

“I know what you’re feeling,” I continued, “but I think we should have lunch here.  It was such a sweet plan, and I’m sure the lobster rolls are still wonderful.  In spite of the plastic benches.”  With that she perked up and began again to bubble with renewed enthusiasm.  I did find these quick shifts in emotion to be attractive.  As one was allowed to think at that time--so intoxicatingly, irresistibly female.

“Yes, yes,” Kim cried as she broke away from me and ran up onto the deserted deck of the Clam Bar and plopped down at a picnic table nearest the water’s edge, waving to me to join her. 

By the time I got there she had already set out the champagne and the normal full radiance had returned to her black eyes.  “Look, look,” she said pointing at the board on which the menu was chalked, “Just as you said they would, they still have them.  Let’s order two and extra-crisp French fries.  I love those too.  And get two empty glasses.  You need to go inside to order and then they’ll bring everything to us.  How does that sound?”  She was the old Kim who I knew from that brief encounter at the college and our hour-long drive from the city.

When I returned to the table, Kim had already removed the wire and gold foil from the champagne and was slowly, with her thumbs, working the cork up the neck of the bottle.  “It bounced around in the car so I have to do this very carefully or everything will explode.”  But in spite of her care, just as she said that, the cork rocketed out and then arced toward the Sound where it fell among the broken glass and rotting seaweed.  And following that there was a geyser of Piper-Heidsieck that ran down Kim’s hand and arm and onto the table. 

She giggled as she licked the dripping champagne from her fingers and wrist, all the while keeping a sultry eye on me.  “This of course is not quite the right way to make a proper birthday toast,” she purred, “One should use a crystal flute.  But happy birthday anyway my Lord.”  And with that she bowed to me, reached out, and put those perfect, still-wet fingers into my mouth where, by sucking on them, I drained the last of the Piper and thereby joined her ribald toast.

*    *    *

On the drive back to the Manhattan, with me this time at the wheel and Kim nestled and humming contentedly in the crook of the arm I needed to negotiate the gear shift, which, in spite of her virtually lying on top of it, somehow I managed to accomplish, she talked in a lazy stream-of-consciousness way about the day (“Can you believe it that they now use lobster that comes frozen from South Africa?  How the world has changed.”) and about that boy in my Black Sun story (“Tell me the truth, Lloyd,” she asked coyly, “what bad little thing did you do to deserve to be punished that way by your mother—to be made to stay under her bed?”)  She did not wait for an answer.  In truth I had none that would advance the mood I was hoping to create for what hopefully awaited back in the city.  So I just smiled as enigmatically and alluringly as I could. 

We were on our way to Avenue B on the Lower Eastside to her new apartment.  “It’s a third-floor walkup,” she alerted me, “I hope you will have something left for me when we get there.”  She laughed so joyously at her own joke that her entire body shook and I almost lost control of the Fiat as we careened across the Willis Avenue Bridge and back into Manhattan).

When we got to her building at the corner of Avenue B and 5^th Street, it was not hard for me to imagine my immigrant grandparents, newly arrived from Poland via Ellis Island, living in Kim’s very-same apartment.  Nothing much appeared to have changed--it was still a tenement; and the streets were still filled with many bent and elderly people from that generation, mainly Ukrainians, with a sprinkling of adventurous NYU students, aging hippies, and anarchists. 

She asked me to park by the police station around the corner since she was certain the top would be cut if we left such a conspicuous car in front of her building.  She reminded me with a smile, not that I needed it, that we were no longer on the set of a Claude Lelouch film.    But even if we found a spot by the precinct house, which I was somehow able to do, she still was concerned that the police would not have the time to protect her father’s car since they were otherwise so occupied chasing the drug dealers out of Tompkins Square Park and into the neighboring streets and racing junkies up to Bellevue’s emergency room.  And with the excitement that I sensed was stirred in her by this nearby threat, she told me that the area hadn’t been the incubator for Murder Incorporated for nothing.

I must admit that like the danger I felt as we sped away from Columbia earlier in the day--palpitations of anticipation and fear that were incited by the beginning of a libidinous adventure—though downtown the threats were of a much different sort—they were to life itself; and though the tabloids of the day were full of lurid stories about innocent victims caught in dope dealers’ and gang-banger’s crossfire, I perversely felt additionally stimulated and could not wait to get to the sanctuary of Kim’s apartment where this heightening lust would find release.  So I took the steps two at a time.

The hallways reeked of rancid cooking fat; there were rat droppings on every landing; a cacophony of crying babies and music blared through steel doors (hers had three latches, including an iron-bar Police Lock)--all stark testimony that Kim was seeking a very different kind of life for herself here than that provided by her parents up in Westchester or from the textureless security of her old place near her college in Bronxville.  I felt certain from all of this visceral evidence—the noise, the smells, the filth, and especially the dangers--that I was somehow part of that new, still inchoate, illicit plan of hers. 

And I was loving every moment of it and could not wait for her to get her front door opened. 

What was taking so long?

*    *    *

Even before I was able to rejigger the Police Lock, they were not needed in Flatbush and so they were unfamiliar to me, she had Miles Davis emitting his mellow chords from the stereo, was it Witches Brew, and she had her top off.  Though she was heading toward the bedroom and I could only see her back, and because the light was failing as the sun set, I could still tell that Kim had also disposed of her bra.  My entire body began to throb.

She called out to me from the bathroom, where I could already hear the tub filling, “Above the sink, Lloyd, in the cabinet, you will find the Tanqueray; and in the fridge there is some Schweppes, a lime, and ice.  Look around for glasses and make two gin and tonics and bring them here.” 

Steam from the bathwater began to seep into her still unfurnished living room.  I thought I heard a gunshot from the street followed by a siren.  But I did not allow myself to be distracted—it was still my birthday, an empty house and cold lasagna waited back in Brooklyn, a magnificent naked woman was waiting in her tub for her gin and tonic, and I was determined to get it to her before the water cooled.

Thus with two crystal cocktail glasses held outstretched before me, both filled to the top with the Tanqueray, Schweppes, and a twist of lime; with the ice cubes rattling from my tremors of anticipation, I marched through Kim’s bedroom, taking notice, as I passed, of the queen-size mattress with its ruby silk sheets sprawled on the floor, without pause I hooked sharply to the right and, as both hands were full, with the top of my head pushed open the etched glass bathroom door and found there, as I had hoped and expected, shrouded in vapor, my own Luvah. 

She had put bath oil in the water and I could see that it had added a polish to her already burnished skin.  Her breasts, her perfect breasts bobbed in the water as she stirred it about herself.  “Come here, come closer,” she whispered when she saw me gazing motionless down at her.  At her command, as I took a tentative step toward the tub, she pulled herself up into a sitting position so that her breasts again, sprang free from the soapy water, her nipples erecting as they hit the cooler air.

Grasping one of the offered glasses, before taking a deep draft from it, she held its frosted surface to her brow to cool herself.  All the while, she did not take her eyes from mine.  “This was how I imagined this day would end,” she cooed, I could hear the liquid sound of Miles seeping through the apartment.  “But now, to make it perfect, I want you to go back out there,” she pointed to the bedroom, “and wait for me.”  I turned to do as she directed as if in a trance.  “I need to do one more thing and then I will join you.”  She added, “And while you are waiting, please make yourself ready for me.”

That direction I understood; and before I reached the mattress, I was completely naked, my clothes scattered about as if they had been torn from me.  But not sure what to do beyond that, I huddled near the corner of the room, awkwardly attempting to cover myself as she came into the room in a shimmering ivory silk gown.   She stood there for a moment, taking me in, and I let my hands drop to my side, letting her see me unashamed and waiting, ready for her in all the necessary ways.

She glided toward me, allowing the gown to part and reveal with each step a different part of her glistening body.  When she reached me she took hold of my penis and began to stroke it with some of the oil that remained on her hand. 

“You are being such a good boy now,” she murmured, “No need then to punish you.  Which is good since, as you have noticed, there is no room for you under my bed.”

Still with her hand on me, allowing her robe to open fully, Kim then knelt before me, stroking me in rhythm to the pensive music from the stereo.  “It is still your birthday, is it not?  You have been telling me the truth?”  The stroking continued and I decided not to interrupt her to remind her that it was she and not I who had made note of the date.  “And since it is, unless you are again being bad, this is the present that I have spent all week preparing for you . . .”

With that she took me, all of me into her mouth.  We both moaned simultaneously.  But the ecstasy was short lived.  Before she had a chance to run her lips over me more than once I fell out of her mouth, unreleased.  Completely flaccid.

*    *    *

Kim did not give up on it, or me.  But neither her silken hands nor eager mouth could reawaken me.  “Do not worry, my sweet,” she intoned, still kneeling before me, “As you know, with little boys, this is frequent.  They are always so over eager.” 

She smiled up at me, still holding me, but I turned away, feeling humiliated and unmanned.  And immediately began to think about what was happening.  Everything had been in place for the perfect liaison—I had carefully covered for myself at the college; Lydia was so preoccupied that she hardly noticed that I seemed more eager than usual to leave for work, failing even to notice how I was dressed; she was going to be at rehearsal well into the evening so there was no pressure on me to reappear in the early evening;  Kim had provided the ideal car for our getaway and had chilled a special champagne; and although City Island had proven to be disappointing, ironically that helped turn our time there into something unpredicted and exciting.  All the ingredients were present, as I understood them from books and films, to assure an ideal illicit afternoon. 

And then there was the intensifying effect of being so surrounded by danger—this too was well suited to bringing out male animal passions.  But in my case, clearly just the opposite had occurred. 

I was indeed a little boy.  And a very little one at that. 

Maybe, I reasoned, it was the champagne and the gin—from my pre-med studies hadn’t I learned about the effects of alcohol on the male libido?  Or was it on erections?  But I wasn’t sure—that was ten years ago.  Or was I over-estimating the erotic stimulation engendered by danger?  I seemed to recall some readings about the dampening effects on sexual capacities during the bombing raids on London during the Second World War.  But then again, I also knew about the power of guilt—I was after all the Jewish son of a Jewish mother.  Maybe, then, that was the source of my problem?

But as Kim continued to touch me, I felt with less motivation and optimism as I was not responding, I caught myself doing what I always tended to do when faced with a daunting dilemma—intellectualize it, search my memory for literary or scientific references or experimental data, deflect my thoughts and feeling from the immediate existential reality.  That usually worked quite well, but in the current humiliating circumstance this technique was making matters worse, and so I took a step back.  Literally.  

Without acknowledging Kim still on her knees, or the collapsed trajectory that the day had taken, I silently gathered my clothes, turned and took them into the living room where the Miles Davis LP had ended and was now soundlessly turning, I dressed quickly and, as I struggled to release the Police Lock, turned back toward Kim, now standing in the bedroom doorway, and nodded and shrugged a brief unspoken “I’m sorry.”

What little light there was lighting her from behind I could still see her sad smile, sad for me, and heard her say, I think without wryness or even disappointment, “It’s all right my Mr. Zazlo.”

*    *    *

It was nearly 7:00 p.m. when I dragged myself onto the D Train, heading south back across the East River to Brooklyn.  All I could think about, in addition to continuously replaying in my head the loop of tape that contained the images and feelings of what had turned out to be a truly miserable day, still frustrated and unable to gain any clear insight about the meaning of any of it, none of my usual tools of analysis being helpful, and though realizing I would soon be made even more miserable when I found myself rattling around in our empty house, alone on my birthday with a limp hunk of lasagna, I managed to salvage at least some small consolation from the debris—I concluded that in my effort to get a woman I had at least made a start.

That house seemed especially cold and empty as I hauled my tired, hung-over body up the front steps and onto the porch.  In its lonely, chilled aspect it appeared a perfect metaphor for all that had transpired and for what I was feeling.  Still trembling from earlier, I could barely get my key into the only lock that was required to secure our door in the leafy enclave.  Though we were not far from Brooklyn’s Avenue B, the house stood on the corner of East 15^th Street and Avenue H, it was such a different reality there that it could have been located on the other side of the world from that other alphabet avenue.  I stood there for a moment with the door finally unlatched and wondered, since it had grown quite dark, if the gangs on Kim’s side of the earth were already marauding outside her windows.

I pushed my way in, pressing my hand against our etched glass door as I had used my head to do very much the same thing just an hour ago; but before I could get to the switch to turn on the light in the entrance hall, which Lydia a week ago had so gracefully vaulted across when she presented herself to Ludavicio, all the lights in the downstairs rooms snapped on at once and I stood there transfixed and rigid in their glare.  Everyone I knew was there—cousins, Brooklyn College colleagues, a couple of school chums with whom I still maintained relationships, some mutual friends that Lydia and I had acquired during the past five years—and they all, as one, shouted “SURPRISE!”

I continued to stand there as if frozen in place.  And from the crowd of grinning friends, wearing her signature leotard and tights, but this time for the occasion, augmented by a full length black wrap-around dancer’s skirt, from among the assembled emerged a widely smiling Lydia, who with arms akimbo, said for me and for all to hear, “You knew I wouldn’t forget your thirtieth or leave you by yourself with left-overs.  While you were away at the college all day” (did she suspect anything?), “I prepared all your favorite dishes.  We’ll be having a Moroccan feast.  Lamb Tagine, Vegetable Couscous, everything.  And of course champagne to toast you.”  (Did she know about the sultry toast at the Clam Bar?)  “I bought six bottles of champagne.”  (We had so little money that I shuddered to think which vintage it might be.)  “This is such a special day.”  (That was not the first time this week or this day that this day had been called “special.”) 

I shook as she spoke, truly surprised and confused, but in fact found that I rather enjoyed being celebrated, and thus on the spot decided to let it all wash over me.  To actually attempt to have fun.  So now with smiles of my own I moved into the embrace of family and friends and, thus enfolded, allowed myself to be drawn into the living room where, this time in leather pants and shirt, was Ludavicio, again draped on the Spanish sofa.

It was clear to me, that after everyone had left, after everything was cleaned up and put away, I had more work to do.  I knew her--Lydia would have other surprises for me.

To be concluded on Monday . . .